You, and along with you the entire educated set, consider the upbringing of children a woman’s noblest and most suitable vocation, though not her only one. And you, a man of masculine intellect, you believe in all seriousness that understanding and fostering a child’s soul requires less logical reason than acquiring a “learned education”?
I am telling you: Raising children is the loftiest and most difficult of all vocations, and among all people, women and men, only few are so highly talented, so select as to fulfill this office according to God’s will. [ . . . ]
“Providing learned education to women,” says the author in the same passage,
“is, in my view, a degradation of women that removes them from a much nobler
realm and also constitutes, apart from complicating women, a deprivation to men,
who, in their own arduous struggle for knowledge, rely on being refreshed by the
unlearned and, for that very reason, the often cleverer and wiser wife.’ [ . . . ]
“Men in their arduous struggle for knowledge,” is your turn of phrase.
I do not know how much toil is involved in preparing a sermon, but I am acquainted with men of science, whose studies are to them the greatest comfort and pleasure, indeed life in its truest meaning. And should one not deduce from your expression “the arduous struggle for knowledge” that all men are scholars? [ . . . ]
Incidentally, many a husband can tell you a thing or two about the nature of that refreshing, charming chattering of a simple, uneducated wife as you intend her, “with fragments of elementary knowledge and even without such.” But there is no arguing about matters of taste; whereas one man would rather hear chatter about washday, good-for-nothing maids, and the malicious ladies next door, another prefers different subjects of conversation.
(pp. 58/59)
“One had better not teach girls too much,” says Mr. von Nathusius, “for
by educating and teaching them too much, one deprives them of a true
asset [ . . . ] How endearing is their ignorance [ . . . ], how much daily pleasure
does one take from men by making girls too learned.’”
What cynical egotism!
As if all that mattered was women providing men with the most pleasure possible! Only a slave exists for the sake of another person.
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